


The Resistance Is Useless

by Hmpf_MacSlow



Category: The Laundry Files - Charles Stross
Genre: Activism, Alienation, Anagnorisis, Conspiracy, Estrangement, Family, Family Dynamics, Gen, Identity, Identity Issues, Intrigue, Magic, OC based on a canon mention, Plotty(ish), Political conflict, Resistance, Secrets, Sibling Relationship, Sorry about the amount of tags, Spies & Secret Agents, authoritarianism, but this story is about a lot of things, canon-compatible through TLI, not set in the same universe as either of my other two Laundry fics, outside pov, political disagreement, post-coup UK, probably not quite in the classical sense, set post-TDB, the part of "family member we disagree with politically" is played by Bob Howard
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-27
Updated: 2020-11-18
Packaged: 2021-03-07 17:13:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,464
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26671207
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hmpf_MacSlow/pseuds/Hmpf_MacSlow
Summary: How do you do the right thing, in a country under New Management? Different circumstances in life make for very different answers to that question.
Comments: 12
Kudos: 8





	1. Prologue: End of the World News

Mobile reception is spotty in Mongolia. As far as Steve is concerned that is as it should be. He didn’t bring a power bank, and by the fifth day his sparingly used phone is dead, and he is happy under the vast skies. He has saved up for this for a long time, and you do not travel to the other end of the world to check your Facebook wall. 

There is nothing but sky and hills and mountains for three weeks. His parents can take care of themselves, and so can Judy and the lab. There are no showers; a lot of the time there are no toilets either. It should bother him but it very soon stops mattering. The hills are every shade of brown, ochre, yellow and green, and at night the Milky Way is scattered bright across the dark.

This is how he manages to miss the news for a full two weeks and four days.

*** 

Then he is back in Ulaanbaatar with its mix of old, utilitarian Soviet architecture and shiny glass facades, its suburbs of nomad tents. He shaves three weeks of beard and goes for Chinese – vivid, deep flavours after weeks of boiled mutton. By seven p.m. he is in bed, dead to the world until three a.m.

At 7:30 in the morning he is supposed to catch his flight from Genghis Khan International. He still hasn’t made any attempt to catch up with the news or his e-mail, so he is surprised at the small gaggle of anxious backpackers crowding the departures desk. 

A crusty youth in weathered Goretex turns to him, says, “Forget it man. Still no civilian flights into Europe.”

*** 

Back at the hostel he finally logs onto the wifi. 

It is all over the _Guardian_. Also the _Independent_ , the _Times_ , and the BBC website. “Leeds attack” yields 843 results on youtube; “Elvish invasion”, 219. He watches blurry mobile phone footage of giant, tentacled beasts spitting acid; ten minutes of an endless column of tanks slowly, incongruously filing through a motorway service station; shaky images of charred bodies in the streets, somebody muttering “oh God oh God oh God” in panicked staccato.

At some point Steve stops clicking, just lets the playlist run on and on.

He almost clicks “next”, though, when the clip from _Newsnight_ comes on; a talking head from the Ministry of Defence promises to add little of value at that point. But this is not the Ministry of Defence as such – it’s the Special Operations Executive, fabled WWII outfit thought long disbanded: nowadays, as he and the rest of the world just learned, the deep-black, magical secret service. 

So he watches on, despite the inauspicious placement of the video this far down on the playlist of disaster porn.

It is a measure of fraternal estrangement that it takes him almost two full seconds before he recognises his brother, despite the fact that his name is right there on the screen. 

Simon is wearing a suit, and it almost doesn’t look wrong on him. His hair is thinning a bit on top, and he seems tired to the point of utter exhaustion. He reels off organisational boilerplate as if it were his job. 

Which, apparently, it is.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, this is it. _The One in Which I Rename Bob_. 
> 
> I know it‘s alienating. That, of course, is the point - or part of it. This is a story _about_ alienation… among other things. It‘s not unfitting for the readers to (initially) feel a kind of alienation that somewhat mirrors the characters‘.
> 
> The "Bob" identity will appear, and be extremely important, later.
> 
> Bob, in canon, has made exactly one mention of having a brother ( _The Fuller Memorandum_ , p.?? - Sorry, my books are currenly boxed up. I hope when I finally look it up I won‘t discover that the brother was specified to be _younger_ than Bob, heh.) It‘s very possible that that mention was a lie - just a part of Bob‘s ongoing project of obfuscating his real identity. But if you‘re me, and thus really into looking at familiar characters from outside POVs, it‘s far more fun to imagine the brother being real. So here, he is.
> 
> This will be a long and plotty fic, which is something I‘ve never done before. My outline for it is longer than many of my finished stories! (This also is the first time in my life that I‘ve done an outline.) I can't guarantee I‘ll manage to finish this story; it‘s by far the most ambitious writing project I have ever begun, and I may be biting off more than I can chew, here. I recognise that preserving momentum is crucial, though, so I‘m going without a beta for now. This, too, is something I‘ve never done. Please feel free to point out errors in comments, including things that feel insufficiently British. I‘ll edit and make corrections as I go.
> 
> Regardless of whether I ever finish this novella, the actual first chapter will be up soon; it‘s basically done and only needs a couple of research-related gaps filled (which will happen once I‘ve unpacked my books; I‘m in the middle of moving, right now). The majority of that chapter is one single scene that also works as a standalone, so no cliffhangers here! Or at least, not this early in the proceedings.
> 
> Oh yeah, and this entire fic‘s title is a joke that probably only works if your first language is one in which the words for "futile" and "useless" are not just semiotically adjacent but also structurally similar – as they are in mine: "zwecklos" vs "nutzlos". Titling my most ambitious - and already rather alienating - story with a joke that only works for people who are bilingual in English and German may not be my wisest decision...
> 
> Oh well.


	2. Chapter 1: The Coup Will Not Be Televised

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The first encounter.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well. This took longer than it should have, and is slightly rougher than I hoped. I'm sorry; the last several weeks have been fairly hellish, and right now it's not clear when things will get better. So I'm giving myself permission to *really* drop my perfectionism for once, and post this as-is, because otherwise I might never get this out. I'll probably go over it with a fine-toothed comb at some later date... possibly several times... (ETA: Done some of that already, now!)
> 
> In the meantime, please tell me about any serious errors you find so I can correct them
> 
> Sorry, btw, if you thought this was going to be set in Mongolia. I'm afraid I just needed Steve out of the way and incommunicado for a while, largely because I think dropping the whole elves/Leeds/magic/Laundry/Bob reveal on him in one fell swoop instead of a slow dribble over several days is far more fun. Plus, the fact that trekking in Mongolia is something he'd do (but also something he can't afford to do on the regular) is doing a little bit of characterisation work, I hope.

In the end, getting back to London takes as long as Steve’s entire vacation did.

Travelling - if it can be called that - in a time of international crisis is a waiting game: sleeping in airports, on cots and on floors, with all the other stranded tourists; chasing rumours, and taking any random opportunity to _move_. Calling his parents from Istanbul, the closest he can get to London by air, he learns that Simon is now inexplicably wanted for murder. Still struggling to assimilate the idea of his little brother as official spokesman of the magical secret service, Steve feels whiplashed, but figuring out no-fly travel options across Europe takes up nearly all of his time and energy.

The first thing he notes as he gets off a Eurostar packed well beyond capacity, a week or so later, is the heavy police presence at St. Pancras. Officers, armed and intimidating in black Kevlar, cluster at entrances and patrol the platforms. It is ridiculous: wherever the next set of invaders will come from – _if_ they come – they certainly won’t arrive via train from Brussels. “Security theatre”, his brother used to call this kind of thing, back in 2001.

There is police in the streets, as well – more than Steve has ever seen outside special occasions like Royal weddings or the Olympics. His online trawls have apprised him of spots of rioting and odd religious unrest erupting throughout the country, yet as he makes the familiar public transport trek to the suburbs the city seems peaceful, if anxious.

The house in which he grew up looks unchanged. He embraces his parents; it’s what you do. Confused worry hangs around the pair of them, shrinking and ageing them.

They tell him that they haven’t heard from Simon, which is not surprising. Simon has been an erratic presence in their lives for years, an absence more than a presence, really, despite the fact that he lives in the same city. Steve, hours away by rail or car, sees them more frequently than his brother does; talks to them more often, too. It would be strange for that pattern to break now of all times, with Simon literally on the run. Whatever Steve may think of him – and he really isn’t sure what to think of him now, having settled, for the time being, on quite actively trying to _not_ think about him – he hopes that Simon still has the sense to keep their parents out of the baffling mess he is in.

The press, in the meantime, digs up new infractions from the 70-odd year history of Q Division on a nearly daily basis. A lot of it seems to Steve like the kind of skeletons you would find in the closets of secret intelligence anywhere, provided the chance for a good rummage. Not that that makes it better; he has what he considers a healthy distaste for the omelette-making ethics of the profession, as inferred from spy fiction and a sampling of investigative journalism over the years.

Among the news trickling out are details of Simon’s alleged crimes. Steve can just about see his brother as an analyst of some sort, or involved on the tech side of things: secret intelligence these days needs plenty of nerds. He doesn’t recognise the Bond-like figure glimpsed in these reports of bodily assault and prison break-outs and murder.

Their parents, of course, maintain that none of it can be true. Half of the time - more than half - Steve is inclined to agree.

In his dad’s study, on the wheezing computer, he watches the Newsnight interview again, and again. Simon’s creepy black cat watches with him, sitting on his lap and demonstrating its utter disdain for his long-standing dislike of cats by purring even louder than the ancient machine’s hard drives.

***

Disconcerted by the new frailty he observes in his parents, Steve hesitates to inform the lab of his return quite yet. It is, after all, plausible enough that he might still be researching transit options from Slavonski Brod.

He settles in for a few more days in his old room, trawling the net every hour or so. In the evenings he prepares needlessly elaborate meals for the three of them to distract himself, to perfunctory protest from his mum. After, they watch the news together tensely, breathing sighs of relieved disappointment when another day ends without any news of Simon.

***

This is the way a democracy dies: with a sudden interruption of a late-night rerun, a news presenter reading platitudes off a screen, the more disquieting for their carefully calibrated vagueness.

There is no specific moment when Steve starts thinking of it as a coup. He likes to believe that he has never been susceptible to conspiracy theories, but the glimpse he has had of the dark underbelly’s dark underbelly, these past couple of weeks, has awakened in him a primal distrust of the facade that hides the obscure machineries of the state.

The next couple of days he and his parents spend glued to the television, in constant, though largely silent alarm. Steve feverishly tries to assemble a picture of what is happening from the confused accounts offered by a variety of news programs, which all too soon, a mere two days in, collapse into eerie unanimity.

At night he haunts the internet, where rumour is rife.

***

On Monday evening, after a day of uneasy, voracious news consumption, a dinner spent under a low-hanging cloud of fear, Steve is busy cleaning up the kitchen. His parents have withdrawn to the sitting room, from which issue television voices heavy with crisis.

The doorbell rings.

“I’ll get it!” Steve calls, already hurrying. His parents do not, generally, get visitors this late, but even in days of cataclysm a neighbour might ask for an egg or a cup of sugar. No need for his mum to get up, with her bad hip.

It isn’t a neighbour.

Simon is wearing cargo pants and a hoodie that looks a hundred years old, and the clothes and the encroaching dusk turn him from the ageing bureaucrat Steve saw on TV back into his little brother. On his face there is a sheepish expression, which instantly changes to surprise.

“Steve!”

“Keep it down, will you?” Steve looks over his shoulder at the sitting room door, but their parents don’t seem to have noticed.

Simon frowns. “Can I come in?” He sounds as if he expects to be turned away.

Steve argues with himself silently, then grabs his brother and drags him inside, closing the door quickly – quietly. Simon lets himself be pulled without resistance, eyebrows raised, into the parlour that is lit only by the street light outside.

“Is this _safe_?” Steve asks, voice lowered.

A snort of annoyed laughter. “Sheesh. What’s with the cloak and dagger routine? You think I’d bring down the police on the parental units? It’s fine, they’ve dropped all charges. Fully reinstated, etc.”

“Reinstated. Really.”

Simon meets his eyes with sullen, tentative challenge.

“Last we heard, SOE had been completely dissolved,” Steve specifies.

Simon shrugs. “It’s being un-dissolved.”

Steve switches on the lights and now he sees that there is something subtly wrong about Simon’s face, although he can’t put a finger on what it is.

“Steve?” their mother calls from the sitting room. “Who was that at the door?”

“Just thought I should pick up the cat,” Simon says, to Steve.

Steve takes a deep breath.

“It’s Simon, mum!” he calls.

***

There is a special sort of awkwardness to welcoming a prodigal after a run-in with the law, a decade of a double life of Clark-Kentian proportions.

Steve keeps to the sidelines, observes as their parents, never the most demonstrative, perform requisite embraces. He notes their hesitations, a tad longer perhaps than their general reservations about physical displays might explain.

He notes that he himself has not made any move to hug his brother.

Later, they are all gathered around the kitchen table, watching Simon dig into the leftover chunk of lasagne. It’s not quite the fattened calf of biblical tradition, but Steve saw the grateful look on his brother’s face when he realised that the proffered food – impossible to refuse after the strident rumblings of his stomach that they all had heard – was made by Steve, rather than their mum.

“Been sitting in meetings all day,” Simon explains. “The only food we had were these sad little cucumber sandwiches. Heaps of them, but roughly zero calories apiece.”

“Meetings?” their father inquires bemusedly, having trouble processing this latest turn in his son’s protean fortunes.

“The country’s been without occult defences for weeks. Some of the people in charge for the interim _thankfully_ realise how suicidal that is, _and_ ,” Simon says around a mouthful, “they understand that the people who’ve been taking care of that shit for decades really _are_ the best qualified to get it all up and running again. But that takes some political and bureaucratic wrangling, seeing as how we currently don’t technically exist at all, on anybody’s org chart. Or didn’t until today, anyway. Lots and lots of talking with very posh people in very well-appointed rooms in Whitehall… It’s all really very boring.” He is bent over his plate, shovelling the last of the pasta into his mouth, not looking at anybody.

 _From fugitive to Whitehall cucumber sandwiches in two days_ , Steve thinks. _Yeah. Boring._ He pushes off the wall against which he’s been leaning, takes the empty plate out of Simon’s hands and carefully places it in the sink.

“So you’re... what’s the job title? Now that you can talk about it,” he asks.

“I was in field ops, for most of the past ten years. Not anymore; I’m management now. Kind of. Current job title’s DSS grade 1, but nobody knows what that means. It’s not what you think, anyway – no matter what it is you’re thinking. Job descriptions don’t mean much right now, we all wear several hats.”

“Wizard hat among them?” Steve inquires, fascinated.

Simon winces. “You need to get that Harry Potter crap out of your head. It’s so far from the truth it’s not even wrong.”

“But you do magic. Magic is real, and you do it. Real, actual magic.” Steve has known this for a while now, of course, but right now he needs nothing more than to hear it confirmed by Simon himself.

Simon studies him. “Does that surprise you? Your sister-in-law has worked as a government-appointed superhero administrator. She’s been on the telly, she’s been in the newspapers. The Met has had its very own superhero, who can _fly_ , for a year now. What did you think all that was?”

“I don’t know,” Steve says, feeling stupid, because he realises that he doesn’t. “I guess I’ve always suspected that the universe was slightly drunk. Ever since I first heard about quantum mechanics.”

“Well, there you go.” Simon smiles, but there is a sadness to it.

“There’s more to heaven and earth --”

“Any sufficiently advanced technology --”

They speak almost simultaneously, and stop. Laugh.

“Seriously,” Simon says. “It’s all maths and physics. It’s just that maths and physics are vaster – and infinitely stranger – than we’ve let people know.”

“We,” echoes Steve, turns it into a question. He is not quite sure what exactly he is digging for.

“The Laundry - that’s SOE Q Division to you. Its equivalents in other parts of the world. A small number of other, select people and groups.”

“Wizards.”

Simon sighs. “If you must.”

A childish exhilaration sweeps Steve, quite suddenly, despite his brother’s admonitions. “Can you… demonstrate? Anything?”

Simon stares at him and reality drops back into Steve’s mind like a load of bricks, crushing the momentary sense of wonder with the memory of Leeds, the awareness that most of the cabinet is dead or in a coma, and that his brother has only just been cleared of monstrous charges levelled against him for reasons still entirely opaque.

“Sorry. I’m sorry.” Steve spreads his hands in helpless apology. “I’m an idiot.” He knows as he speaks that he has missed the point, even in apologising, because Simon keeps looking at him with something that Steve only belatedly understands is close to horror. Steve watches with alarm as Simon collects himself, takes a tight, then tighter hold of himself – closes up completely.

“Say,” their father cuts in, blithely, “with all that time spent in Whitehall, maybe _you_ can tell us what’s going on.”

Simon takes entirely too long to reply.

“I’m… not exactly privy to the highest councils of government,” he says. “This is all administrative, nuts-and-bolts stuff, this stuff I’m involved in... It’s not the kind of thing you’d be interested in.”

“Well, but -”

Simon raises a hand, stopping their father in his tracks, and it is _probably_ not magic, Steve thinks, only the sudden shift in the balance of authority that the revelations of the last month have left in their wake.

Probably.

“But,” Simon continues - and there is an odd weight to that _but_ , “ _if_ I were involved in anything higher up, or knew anything about what’s happening higher up… that wouldn’t be stuff I’d be able to share. So don’t ask me about that.”

There is a pause, their father taking a bewildered breath, getting ready to rephrase his question.

“And trust me,” Simon adds before he can. “You wouldn’t _want_ to know about it.”

Steve watches his brother, sees the tension in his body, his closed-off face.

Their father laughs, uneasily. “C’mon, son. There has to be _something_ you can say… you know, off the record...”

Simon takes a look around the room, at light fixtures, kitchen cabinets, the curtains framing the window.

“You don’t want to know,” he says, finally.

 _Shit_ , Steve thinks. _He believes the house is bugged_.

Then: _Of course the house is bugged._

It startles him how easily the thought comes. He catches Simon’s gaze.

“So… they’re reconstituting your… organisation, now.”

Simon meets his eyes levelly. “We do a vital job.”

“Interesting timing.”

Simon makes no reply.

The uneasy silence is broken by a “mrrrrow” from below. Simon’s face softens, slightly.

“Hey, Spooky. Did you miss me, hm? Probably not. It’s not like I’m home much. I’m still not sure if you even like me, or just need me to open tins.”

The cat rubs against Simon’s leg and he reaches down to scritch behind its ears. “Okay, I guess you like me a little bit. – Sorry about making you do the cat-sitting,” he adds, in the direction of their father.

If he is hoping for some reassurance that it wasn’t a hardship, he is not going to get it. Then again, he probably knows that. He busies himself with the cat a little longer, running a hand along its sleek black back as it figure-eights around his legs, mewing.

“They were saying such terrible things about you!” their mother quavers, suddenly. Until then she hasn’t spoken, just watched Simon intently, with a puzzled frown.

The tautness is back instantly, in every line of Simon’s body, and his answer again is too long in coming.

“They tried to get all of us, anyone highly placed in the organisation, on all sorts of false charges. It was a coordinated attack on the Laundry, SOE Q Division, as a whole.”

Steve waits, but their parents appear to be willing to let Simon get away with that.

Steve is not.

“I don’t think mum meant whatever it was they had you in custody for, that first day.”

The house may be bugged, but this _has_ been all over the news for weeks.

“Steve,” their father admonishes, weakly. Steve ignores him.

“They held you, I’m sure, on false charges. And then you _ran_. I mean, we know that actually happened, because everybody was looking for you, and here’s dad with his sinuses clogged from taking care of your cat for two weeks. And you --”

Simon interrupts.

“Jo. Her name’s Jo. She’s a colleague. Of sorts.” He pauses. “I was as careful as I could be.” Another, minute pause. “She’s going to be okay.”

“Oh,” their mother breathes. “ _Oh._ ”

Steve swallows, hard.

“The other one was a cab driver,” Simon continues. “I couldn’t risk a conscious witness. I already knew it wasn’t just me who was under attack.”

Belatedly Steve realises he expected an explanation, not a confession.

“What did you do to them?” His voice gets away from him a little, goes trembly and weird.

“What do you think?” Simon’s mouth is tight with distaste. He throws Steve a glance, full of a strange, intense anger; looks away. “ _Magic._ ”

That, of course, explains precisely nothing.

“What they said about you on the news got… wilder, after that.”

Simon sits very still, hands flat on the table. When he finally replies, his voice is flat, too.

“We had to get our people out of that camp before the oppo got them.”

“’We’ as in you, personally? Or is this more of an organisational type of ‘we’?” Steve feels transported into some absurd American courtroom drama; isn’t quite sure how they got there.

“I was there, yes,” Simon says.

Steve suddenly finds it impossible to continue.

He is surprised when it is their father who does.

“They… they said... on the news, I mean... they said that you... killed… an army lawyer. And --”

“Oh, don’t be _absurd_ ,” their mother interrupts, shrilly. “That was just one of their lies. It was, wasn’t it.” She looks at Simon, expectant. (Pleading.)

Simon glances at her, then at their father, but he holds Steve’s gaze again when he finally says slowly, clearly:

“I did not kill those people.”

Their mother lets out an odd little puff of a laugh. “See? Of course he didn’t. _Of course_ you didn’t.”

“The people we were trying to protect our people from, they did,” Simon offers. There is a strain in his voice, an almost-breaking. “They were right on our heels.”

Steve exhales his tension.

_Of course he didn’t._

The news, vague due to the classified nature of most of the details, had implied scenes of appalling slaughter.

_They were right on our heels._

“That must have been terrifying,” Steve says. It terrifies him now, his little brother escaping some unspecified deadly – magical? _(Of course magical.)_ \- menace, by the skin of his teeth.

Simon makes a sound that isn’t agreement, isn’t denial.

“What, just another day at the office?” It is a joke, barely – a dig at Simon’s restraint that Steve wants, _needs_ to be nothing more than a nerd’s emotional constipation.

Simon sags a little, letting them see his exhaustion, at least.

“You don’t have time to be terrified, in the moment, most of the time,” he says. “You just do the work.” He sounds as tired as he looks, looks as tired as if he hasn’t slept since the Newsnight interview. “Actually, no. That’s a lie. Yes. It was terrifying. It is.”

_I was in field ops, for most of the past ten years._

“Is this… is this a kind of thing that happens to you on… a somewhat regular basis? Did they send you, out of everyone available, because that’s… the kind of thing you do?” Steve can’t help it, he is fascinated again. Fascinated, and terrified.

“They sent me, out of everyone available, because ‘everyone available’ was – _is_ \- a pretty small pool. And I have some... experience, dealing with sticky situations.” Simon doesn’t quite meet anybody’s eyes.

Then he seems to come to some kind of decision and ploughs on, with sudden, urgent fervour.

“Listen. What I do, what I _really_ do… that is all still classified, ok? Just because I can now tell you, in the barest sense, where I work, doesn’t mean I can talk about what I do. Let alone _demonstrate_ , for fuck’s sake.” He gives Steve a look here, and Steve wilts.

“I can’t _speak_ about this stuff. If I breathe as much as a word about most of it to anyone who isn’t cleared, I’m dead. Not in a hypothetical, if-they-find-out-they-might-court-martial-me sense. In a literal, immediate, the-moment-I-speak-my-brains-will-boil-in-my-skull sense. _That’s_ what magic is, that’s what magic _does_ , that’s _what this job is like_.”

Simon takes a deep breath.

“I need you to understand that,” he adds, gentler.

Steve feels caught in dense surreality like hardening amber. He needs to say something but can’t find the words that would break him out of his sudden, paralysing sense of _none of this is real_.

“Court-martial?!” - Their mother, latching on to the _least_ alarming alarming thing.

“SOE is a branch of military intelligence,” Steve says. “Technically.” He has known this for as long as he has known about magic, give or take an hour. Somehow it feels more unreal.

Nothing about it fits the Simon he knows.

“ _Was_. They’re creating a new ministerial portfolio for this stuff now. The Ministry of Magic jokes will never end.” Simon sighs. “Well... a military frame of reference isn’t the worst, actually, for understanding what we do. I’ve worked with army people a lot. Magic is just another front on which to defend the country. That’s what we’re all about.”

That doesn’t sound like the Simon Steve knows, either.

“And we _are_ at war. The rest of the country just hasn’t quite caught on yet. That’s pretty much the only thing the New Management have got going for them, that they’re not wilfully ignoring that fact.”

There is a lot to digest here, so much that Steve can’t help but file most of it away for later. But --

“War?” asks their father, with an embarrassing degree of eagerness.

What happens on Simon’s face then is so incompatible with Steve’s concept of him that he can’t make sense of it, and it is over too quickly for him to dwell on because the cat chooses that moment to jump on the table and start head-butting Simon’s shoulder.

“Hey.” And Simon is all relieved surprise, no more mysteries writing themselves on his face. “Huh.” His hands go up to cup the animal's small head, glide down the soft sleekness of its back, down to the root of its tail, once, twice. “Guess you do like me.” The cat lifts its hindquarters, ecstatic.

“Bloody hell. Get a room, you two,” Steve mutters. He wants to ask about the “war” his brother mentioned, wants to see that expression on Simon’s face again and have the time to read it, but as he watches him with the pet, sees the tenseness melt from his shoulders and back, he relents.

_Some other time._

Their father doesn’t bother hiding his disgust but remains silent, as well. Perhaps even he, for once, can read the room.

Their mum is watching Simon with the expression of someone trying to solve a particularly vexing crossword puzzle. She moves along the edges of the room, trying different angles of view.

The cat’s purr, deep and resonant, fills the silence.

Steve is struck by the way exhaustion seems to take over his brother’s body as the tension drains, a process of subsidence. He is accustomed to thinking of Simon as young - the eternal kid brother - but it is undeniable now that he is middle-aged. A fairly hard-used middle-age, at that.

Their mother comes to a stop across the table from the tableau of man and cat. She leans forward a little; squints. She opens her mouth to speak, then shuts it again. Frowns. She cocks her head, perhaps trying yet another angle. Her eyes never leave Simon’s face.

She clears her throat.

“Did you do something to your eyebrows?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Did he do something to his eyebrows? Yes, he did - to mess with facial recognition algorithms while he was on the run. (I still haven't been able to dig out my books to find the exact reference, but it's somewhere in the latter parts of TDB.)


End file.
